


this must be the place.

by dickovny



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Body Horror, Car Accidents, F/M, Groundhog Day, Haunted House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:33:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25043953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dickovny/pseuds/dickovny
Summary: In which Joyce and Jim have a lovely Sunday at home. Again. And Again. And AgainIt takes them a while to realize the house might be trying to kill them. By then it might be too late.
Relationships: Joyce Byers/Jim "Chief" Hopper
Comments: 24
Kudos: 25





	1. home is where I want to be.

He heard the sound of water. A steady tap - tap - tap of a drizzle on the hardwood floor. But he was a notoriously heavy sleeper and the light stream wasn’t enough to rouse him entirely. Instead it stayed a small and persistent nag in the back of his head, as his dumb animal brain tried to maintain his lack of consciousness. Trying to escape the sound, Jim rolled over and a burst of pain shot from his hip to his left foot.

 _That_ was enough to wake him.

It had been like this for years, ever since that stupid fucking bike accident with Lonnie, so it wasn’t a surprise. As he waited patiently for the pain to subside, the wet noise came back into the foreground. That and the sensation that he was definitely laying a few inches lower than he should be. Explained why the leg was so angry.

A snore erupted from the shape next to him, this tiny lump of blanket halfway covering a mop of unruly brown hair. Great. The only thing worse than a leaking fucking waterbed was waking his wife up to deal with it.

“Shit. Joyce. _Joycie, hon_ ,” he mumbled, shaking her shoulder a bit less gently than he probably should have.

“No. Tired,” she muttered. “Not yet.” In a futile attempt to block him out, Joyce grabbed a pillow to cover her head but, being the more alert of the two, Jim caught the other side. 

“Joyce. Babe. Bed’s leakin’,” he sighed, pausing for a response. Crickets. _Okay._ Once more with feeling then. “Bed. Is. Leaking. We have to _get up_.”

“Fuck. _Shit._ Seriously?” 

Ah. There she was.

“Fuck - okay okay.” Bolting upright, she kept rubbing her eyes, trying to induce focus and wipe off the residue of sleep. Her abrupt movements shifted the water in the mattress and the leak squirted even higher.

“Sweet fucking _christ_ ,” she sighed, pushing the covers off. There was a tiny splash when her feet hit the floor. “Why do we own one of these pieces of shit?” 

“I love your mouth, I hope you know that.” Jim leaned over to her, scratching his bare chest like some kind of drugged caveman, and kissed her shoulder softly. “And if our mattress wasn’t draining out from under us I’d do something nasty about it. But alas, we are not so lucky. There is a very wet disaster unfolding here, and fixing it is gonna _suck._ ”

It took both of them to haul the mattress across the bedroom and into the adjoining bathroom to drain in the tub. Water is heavy. Like, _really_ heavy. And there’s a lot of the stuff in a queen-sized waterbed. Between his leg and her diminutive size, it was a very lengthy, labor-intensive process. It would’ve been a lot funnier watching her furious little mouth as her tiny arms strained to make any kind of headway if there wasn’t a solid half-inch of water on the floor. Jim sat on the edge of the empty bed frame and bent down to peel off a wet sock.

“Wasn’t this stupid water bed your idea?” she called out to him from the bathroom. He hated the way she would just _yell_ from other rooms, but she was always kind of a shouty one. There really wasn’t any changing that. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to anyway. It was kinda endearing, in its own way.

“Thank God it’s Sunday. At least we don’t have to go anywh - “

She was interrupted when her foot connected with one of those little puddles as she came into the bedroom, and she fell. Hard. There was a sickening _crack_ as her elbow connected with the dresser on the way down. It was already starting to swell when he cradled it in his hands, kneeling on the wet floor next to her. She hissed when he touched it.

“Looks like it hurts.” He rotated her arm this way and that, checking for any breaks. It seemed to extend just fine, but they wouldn't be able to tell how bad it was until the swelling went down.

“No shit, Sherlock.” She playfully swatted at the side of his head. “Help me up, why don’t you?”

He insisted that she go downstairs and ice it and let him finish cleaning up. By the time he was done wringing the last of the towels out into the tub, the welcome smell of coffee wafted up to him from the kitchen. He followed it down to find her sitting at the table, surrounded by charcoal sketches, her arm resting on a ziploc baggie full of crushed up cubes.

Joyce was so goddamn cute, practically swimming in the old t-shirt of his that she slept in. One leg was draped on the opposite chair while the other bent at the knee, awkwardly shoved between herself and the table. He reveled in the expanse of visible skin along her legs. Until he noticed just how disconcerted she looked with the drawings she had strewn all about the table.

He gave them a once over as he poured himself a steaming mug of coffee and then again as he sat down next to her.

To say they were a little _upsetting_ would be an understatement.

They were a series of portraits, all of them children and they had these big haunted eyes, like they were looking at something awful just out of frame. Joyce had always been a talented artist but her usual medium was sculpture. Very rarely did she feel the compulsion to draw, and even then those were mostly doodles and quick little one-off sketches. These were unlike anything he had seen her do, burgeoning with realism. They looked so desperate. He didn’t like it, that was for sure.

The freakiest part though - he felt like he knew them. Especially the little girl with the too-short curls and chapped lips. Something about her specifically called to him.

“Don’t take this weird or anything but uh, Joyce?” He reached for the page with the girl on it and she didn’t even look up at him, so caught in this damn trance. “What the fuck are these?”

“I don’t know. I started doing them a few weeks ago, I guess. At least, that's they way I've dated them. I think.” Her teeth caught her lower lip in frustration. She had a terrible habit of gnawing on the darn thing when she was thinking. “Do they look familiar to you?”

“I think so, yeah. The girl, especially,” Jim admitted. “I’ve definitely seen her somewhere.”

“That’s the thing. They _shouldn’t_ .” When she finally did look up at him, her eyes were wide and fearful. Her hand trembled as she picked up her mug. “I’ve never actually seen them before. I keep dreaming about them.”

“Well doesn’t that prove your point? Don’t we dream about faces we’ve seen before?” Something about this didn’t sit right, and he couldn’t resist the comfort of some good old-fashioned rationalization. “That’s how the whole thing works. We don’t just pull ‘em from thin air. I mean, I’m not a doctor or anything but I’m pretty sure.”

She snorted derisively and rolled her eyes, shuffling through the pages to find a specific drawing. She settled on one and slid it towards him, a young boy. He looked fragile, with this pair of enormous round eyes poking out from his fringe, his face just a little too thin. Shit, if he didn't know better he'd say that he almost looked like Joyce.

“What’s his name, Jim?” She bit the nail of her thumb as she waited for him to answer.

"What do you mean, what's his name? It's your drawing. How would I know?" This was absolutely ridiculous. He loved his wife, really, but whatever this creepy drawing game was, it was starting to go too far.

"Look at him," she pleaded. "Just look at him and tell me his name."

Somehow, he just knew, without a second thought. He couldn't explain it to her and he definitely couldn't explain it to himself.

“Will. His name is Will.”

Wordlessly, she flipped the page over. On the back, in what was clearly _his_ handwriting, was a name.

_Will Byers._

“Joyce, what the _fuck_ -”

“I don’t know! I don’t have a single clue. And honestly? I’m not even sure I remember drawing these, and I’m sure you don’t remember writing _that_ , do you?”

He didn’t like this. He _really_ didn’t like this. The little hairs on the back of his neck were standing up and his tongue felt weird, like it didn’t fit in his mouth right. So, of _course_ there was more.

It was late afternoon when she yelled to him from the backdoor. He had to strain to hear her from his office. Always so much _yelling_.

“I need to show you something outside, in the backyard. You’re uh. Probably not gonna like it.”

He sighed, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray behind his typewriter. This manuscript was due to his publisher in less than a month and today was the first day in a long time he felt like he was making any real progress. Although he was probably going to hate whatever he had cranked out when he reread it that evening, as these things usually went. He just couldn't find a way for the detective to _find_ the murder weapon that didn't sound totally outlandish and he was really struggling with the romance angle his publisher wanted crammed in.

It was hot as hell outside and his t-shirt immediately started to cling to his chest. Joyce seemed unfazed by the way the sun beat down on them, or at least too focused on something else to really care. She was standing barefoot, in a pair of worn-out denim shorts, with her arms folded across her chest. Whatever fresh hell she had in store was apparently in her Tickseed flowers. He was relieved to see that they looked totally fine.

“I don’t get it. What’s wrong with ‘em? They’re small and yellow. That’s … good, right?” He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and thumped it against his palm, before opening it and offering one to her. The readiness with which she took one did not bode well. She didn’t smoke, at least not often and certainly not like the chimney he was, but she seemed to really need one today.

“Get down there and really look. At the dirt under them.”

“What exactly am I looking for?” His leg screamed in protest as he knelt - it was getting worse. Maybe it was all the humidity. Getting all the way down here had better be worth it.

“Oh, trust me." She took one long drag from her cigarette, puffing her smoke at the sky. "You’ll know when you get there.”

Boy, did he.

“What the _fuck_?”

Everywhere he could see, every single inch of soil, was riddled with some kind of mushrooms or fungus or something. But they weren’t normal mushrooms. They were shaped all wrong, running like gnarled veins coming out of the dirt, inky black with a green mottling throughout. And they smelled - no, _reeked_ \- like sulfur and spoiled meat. Like somebody left a bag of wet garbage in the hot sun.

They looked like they were moving. Pulsating even. His stomach turned and he gagged.

“Right? I don’t know where to even start with that.” She laughed, dry and mirthlessly. “Oh wait, have you seen the slugs yet?”

 _Slugs?_ Fighting the stench, he leaned closer. And sure enough, crawling along the surface of the fungus was a whole hell of a lot of slugs. Fat, black slugs, none of them longer than his thumb. Which was bad enough. But they moved way too fast. And - did they have teeth? They had teeth. A lot of teeth. Nope. This was distinctly not okay.

“Okay. So we call an exterminator, a bug guy. That’s what they do, that’s what they’re for. Okay. This is fine, we can just call somebody and they’ll come fix this.“ He was already heading back for the house, determined to just deal with this as fast as possible and never think about it again. The sound of the screen door slamming shut behind him barely even registered.

His office was so disastrously over-cluttered that he struggled to find the phone book. Joyce liked to give him shit about this, mostly in jest, but this was just how he _liked_ it. He enjoyed the graveyard of half-finished cups of coffee and never being able to find a full manuscript when he wanted it. This was just how he wrote. And he did find the phone book. Eventually. Under two old newspapers riddled with underlining and notes, and a “Crime Novel of the Year Award.” He thought about framing it but honestly, the award felt like bullshit at the time. It still kinda did. Who the hell needs an award to write fucking pulp novels? It was like a ‘least shitty real book’ award or an ‘almost a grown-up writer’ ribbon.

He slammed the heavy book on the kitchen table, flipping through the yellow pages. Should he choose _AAA Exterminators_ or _Best Pest Control_ or _Blue Ribbon Bugs_? The logo for Best Pest was nice. Big ol’ cartoon cockroach getting bonked with a mallet. That boded well.

“Are you really gonna pretend this isn’t weird?” He didn’t even hear her come in, jumping in spite of himself at the sound of her voice.

“The bugs are weird, yes. But aren’t all bugs weird? We’re just gonna call a guy and he’s gonna come out here and kill them and then we’ll be fine.” There was a note next to the phone in his handwriting - “ _call jonathan PLEASE.”_ Jonathan. Fuck. His weird nerdy little agent. He was supposed to call him today about an advance. Whatever. After the exterminator.

The line rang. A lot. And then clicked over to an answering machine that instructed him to leave his name and number and the nature of his problem blahblah _blah_. He hung up, then dialed for _AAA Exterminators_ instead.

They didn’t answer either. They didn’t even have a machine.

He should’ve known at this point that _Blue Ribbon Bugs_ wouldn’t answer either. They at least had a machine and he decided to leave a message this time. Maybe it was just Sundays. That’s what it had to be. Exterminators just don’t work on Sundays.

All of them.

He might as well call Jonathan while he’s here. So he did. But that went to a machine too. _When did this whole town get so goddamn religious?_

This was getting out of hand. _He_ was getting out of hand. He needed to take a minute to breathe, that was all. Joyce had a tendency to get a little carried away sometimes and this time he just got a little carried away with her.

She stared at him from the other side of the kitchen, doing that thing where her eyes got so big they took up half of her face. He went to her and placed his hands on her shoulders.

“Listen, I think we woke up a little rough today and got all worked up over nothing. Yes, I'll admit the drawings are a little _weird_ but all drawings of sad kids are probably creepy. And the bugs are just _bugs._ Someone will come out and fix it for us tomorrow.” He realized at some point that he was saying this just as much for himself as he was for her. Talking it out like this was helping, was getting rid of that weird bile taste in the back of this throat. His heart was hammering in his chest and he wished it would just stop. Why was he so afraid? _Get it together, James._

“It’s gonna be okay, hon. I promise.” He took her chin in his hand now, tilting her face up towards his. “Can you tell me you’re gonna be okay?”

Her eyes were misty with tears, the way they were just _so dark_ always amazed him a little. She took a deep breath, steadied the trembling of her lip and gave him a brief nod.

“Good. See? We’re good.” She was so small, the way her head just cradled into his chest. He could cover the whole back of it with his hand so easily - he held her like that for a while, letting her inhale him, listening to her breathing growing slower and deeper. “Don’t you have some clay piece you need to work on today? That commission?”

“Yeah. I do.” She pulled back from him, laughing softly at herself and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry - I feel so dumb. I got so freaked out over nothing. It was just some drawings and some dumb slugs.”

Just some drawings and some dumb slugs. Exactly.

So why did he feel like he was going to _throw up_?

The rest of their day passed so blissfully, perfectly, wonderfully uneventfully, that by the time his head hit the pillow he had almost completely forgotten about the fear that had coiled in his belly that afternoon. He chose to focus instead on the weight of his wife’s leg draped over him, the little sleepy noises she made as she snuggled closer into him. The pull-out sofa was cramped and would likely leave his back all kinds of messed up in the morning, but it was the only option in lieu of the water bed.  
  
And really, he didn’t mind so much. It was a nice life. He should have thanked Lonnie for it. If it hadn’t been for that accident - for Lonnie being stupid and drunk and plowing his car directly into Jim’s motorcycle and crushing his leg - he would’ve been drafted right along with him. It was staying in Hawkins, stuck in a wheelchair for that whole summer while Lonnie crawled through some Vietnamese shithole, that brought him and Joyce so close. Sure, he could never play football and couldn’t be a cop like he wanted to be and was in constant fluctuating agony.

But he had Joyce. And that was enough.

He slept deeply and without dreams. And he woke the next morning to the sound of water. A steady tap - tap - tap of a drizzle on the hardwood floor.


	2. pick me up and turn me around.

He woke the next morning to the sound of water. A steady tap - tap - tap of a drizzle on the hardwood floor.

His leg hurt. A lot. Almost as bad as it did that summer, the one that Joyce spent pushing him all around Hawkins and doodling cartoons and dirty jokes on his cast in smearing black sharpie. Bad enough that he was coated in a thick sheen of sweat. Hell, even the sheets were wet. He was thoroughly embarrassed, praying to god that somehow Joyce wouldn’t notice, until it occurred to him that maybe the dampness around him was related to the faint dripping noise next to his head.

Son of a bitch. The bed was leaking.

Joyce woke next, begrudgingly, eyes full of a sleep and a mouth full of expletives. It took a good deal of time and effort to maneuver the cumbersome mattress into the bathroom to allow it to drain into the tub. Jim sat for a moment on the empty bed frame to catch his breath and peel off a soaking wet sock.

“Wasn’t this stupid water bed your idea?” she called out from the bathroom. He hated the way she would just _yell_ from other rooms, but she was always kind of a shouty one. There really wasn’t any changing that. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to anyway. It was kinda cute.

“Thank God it’s Sunday,” he whispered to himself.

“Thank God it’s Sunday,” she said, as she re-entered the bedroom.

“At least we don’t have to go anywh-” They spoke in unison as Jim sprung to his feet, lunging to catch her as her foot hit a puddle on the hardwood and flew out from underneath her. It would have been a nasty fall, but Jim threw his weight into her at just the right moment, instead letting her come to rest against his chest.

She gasped in pain, clutching at her elbow. A bruise - several days old, in psychedelic greens and purples, ringed in yellow - covered a good six or so inches of her arm instantaneously. And then vanished just as quickly.

“What? What the _fuck,_ Jim?” She stared at him, open-mouthed. “You saw that right?”

He did. And he really didn't like it.

“How about you go downstairs and make some coffee?” This was weird. All of this was weird and _wrong_ and he desperately needed some caffeine to process it. “I’ll finish cleaning all of this up.”

He was trying not to panic as he wrung the last of the towels out into the tub. But he couldn’t deny what he saw. The bruise freaked him the fuck out. Even more than that, what he hadn’t told her. He caught her because he _knew_ she was going to fall.

Because he had seen her fall already.

As he came down the stairs, he mulled over the best way to broach the subject without scaring her. He was wigged out enough already, somebody needed to be the level-headed one. Jesus, they were really in trouble if he needed _Joyce_ to be the level headed one. He opted for a gentle, tactful approach.

“Did this morning feel … _familiar_ to you at all, hon?”

“Jim - how did you catch me? Be honest. Something doesn’t feel right. This doesn’t feel - right,” She scooped coffee grinds into the filter distractedly. “And then that shit with my elbow? What was that? It looked like I hurt it pretty badly, and I felt like I hurt it pretty badly, but not today. Like I hurt it before. But I don’t remember doing that, and then that bruise showed up and went away. I don’t know. Something’s wrong. Off.”

The kitchen table was a disaster. Almost every inch was covered in drawings, charcoal sketches, all crumpled and coffee stained. These weird pictures of creepy, scared looking kids. Some of them were in profile, looking off into the distance, their faces masks of terror, gaping at some unseen horror out of frame. All but the girl - the one with the curls. She looked angrier than she was scared. A droplet of blood congealed at the edge of her nostril. He liked her.

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.” How could he explain this to her without sounding like a complete fucking lunatic? “It’s like I looked down at my foot and my stupid wet sock and suddenly I found myself saying what you were going to say while you said it. And then I saw you falling before you started to fall. Like I’d seen it before. Like we’d done this before - but instead last time I didn’t catch you. Last time I didn’t know and you fell and you smacked your elbow so goddamned hard - it was all swollen and we came down here - “

“ - and I sat at the table and I iced it. It didn’t matter that I iced it because it bruised anyway. Fat and purple,” she turned her arm over and held it over the sink in the full daylight of the window. It was completely unblemished. “What the _fuck,_ Jim?"

He rubbed at his beard, trying to process the flurry of images that swam before him. The harder he thought about the memory, about her falling, the more elusive it became. Like trying to look at a floating distortion in your vision, a scratch on your eye, constantly moving just out of sight. But the bits he did remember, anything he could latch onto at all, made him feel very, very ill. And then he had a thought that really made the bottom of his stomach fall right onto the floor.

“Do you remember yesterday?” he asked so quietly it was almost as if he was asking himself.

Joyce was still at the sink, marveling at her elbow. “I’m sorry?”

He stood slowly and walked to her, putting his hands on her shoulders and gently turning her to face him. 

“This is really fucking important, and maybe I’m just crazy, but uh. I can’t remember _yesterday._ I know we live in this house, and that I love you.” He was looking directly in her eyes, and she smiled at this. _Good. Keep her nice and calm, Jim._ “I can remember our wedding. I can remember the accident. I have all the long-term memory shit intact. But yesterday? Yesterday doesn’t exist for me. All I can figure is you fell and hit your elbow.”

Concern crept across her face.

“But. I fell because the floor was wet, right? And the floor was wet because the bed leaked. But the bed didn’t leak until this morning. And I didn’t fall this morning. I didn’t fall at all. But I remember falling.” She fell silent for a minute, making the shift from concern to panic, possibly to fear. “Jim I don’t … I don’t remember anything. Not just yesterday but _anything._ There’s things I _know_ but I don’t remember them. What is this? What _is this?_ ”

He limped to the living room to find a pen and paper. God, his leg was _killing_ him today. He came back to the kitchen with a legal pad and sat at the table, pushing aside a drawing of some kid with a huge mouth and an even bigger mane of hair poking out from under a ballcap. He could feel himself starting to come unglued.

“Okay. Okay. What we’re gonna do is start by listing all the things we _do_ remember.” He could feel her starting to object and raised his hand. Fucking _pedant_. “Or _know_. Remember or know. Things we are sure of. Let’s start with the basics.” 

Joyce set two mugs of coffee on the table and sat down to join him.

“Okay. Basics. Right. Our names are Joyce and James Hopper. You’re my husband.”

She smiled as he scrawled their names, followed by ‘MARRIED’ in all capitals. He would find it funny too, if he could get his hand to stop shaking.

“I sell sculptures. You write books. We fell in love when you got your leg crushed by my idiot boyfriend’s car.” She struggled to find more things to list. “We live here?”

The next thought he had, or the lack of a thought, was very _very_ bad.

“Where - Joyce, where is _here_?”

They looked at each other in stunned silence. Fuck. _Fuckfuckfuck_.  
  
“Joyce. I need you to tell me _right now_ where we live. Because I don’t know where we live. And the fact that I don’t know where we live is scaring the ever-loving _fuck_ out of me right now.”

She swallowed hard, then reached her trembling hand to the drawing of the ballcap kid, flipping it over. The charcoal writing on the back, smudged as it was, was undoubtedly his. And he knew without looking what it would say.

_Dustin Henderson._

When she finally spoke, it was so quiet that he almost didn’t hear her.

“I don’t know where we are, Jim.” Her voice broke a little as she said his name. It sounded as if she might cry. “I don’t know where we are at all.”

Jim was a tangled nest of fear and panic. He could feel the bile creeping up the back of his throat, the way the adrenaline was starting to course through his veins. Sweat built on his brow and he was finding it particularly difficult to breathe. “You know how we fix this? We just leave. Simple. Easy peasy. We just get in the car and drive into … town. And talk to someone else.”

He tossed Joyce a pair of jeans left piled in the recliner. She caught them and quickly shimmied them up her legs.

“What if we _can’t_? What if there’s nothing out there?”

Jim was not an organized person, not by a long shot. He believed Joyce’s preferred description of him was an _absolute goddamn disaster._ The longer it took him to find the car keys the more he was convinced that maybe they didn’t even exist.

But that was dumb. They were right where he left them. On the coffee table. Under an old shirt and an upturned TV Guide. Right. See? Everything was fine. Everything was going to be fine, goddammit, and he needed to make her see that.

“Listen, we’ll deal with that when we get to it. We’re together, okay? We’ll figure this out together, whatever that means. We’re gonna go to town and talk to somebody and we’ll feel real dumb about all this,” he murmured, clutching her tightly against his chest. She pulled away to look at him, cupping his face in her hands, and he closed his eyes and relaxed into the touch. She was so small and light and delicate.

But never fragile.

He bent down to meet her halfway and her lips brushed against his. They sat for a moment like that, foreheads touching, breathing each other’s air. The silence weighed on their skin - and while he was truly inclined to stay like that forever, there was still the matter of whether or not they _could actually leave the house._

There was a red car in the driveway that neither of them really remembered ever buying or driving before, but it seemed to be theirs. The seat and the mirror were already positioned perfectly for him, the key on the ring worked in the ignition, his brand of cigarettes sat in the center console. So they fastened their seatbelts, and with great trepidation reversed down the drive. Her hand settled on his atop the gear shift.

“See? We can leave the house. Everything’s fine right? Nothing to worry about.”

Everything was _not fine._

“Jim, that next house looks a lot like our house,” she said, and as they started to get closer, they could confirm that yes, this house was identical to the one they just left. In fact, so were the trees, and the fence, and the mailbox. It appeared that as they were leaving the house behind them they were also pulling up to the same house in front of them. 

“Ok, I see your point. Maybe the houses in this neighborhood look the same, alright? Like one of those planned communities. Let’s just keep going,” he said, trying to keep the mounting hysteria from creeping into his tone. But as the car continued to roll on down the highway, it approached a third house. Exactly the same. His mouth was suddenly _very dry._

“Jim?” Joyce’s breath quickened and that childhood sensation of something being _right behind him_ started to spread across the back of his neck, that feeling of the monster behind you as you climb up the basement steps.

“What the actual _fuck,”_ he whispered, pressing his foot more firmly on the gas pedal.

A fourth house. A fifth house. The same house over and over and _over and over_. Faster and faster the houses started to loop by the window as the speedometer crept to 70 then 80 then 100 _._

They had both fallen silent. Not like they would have been able to hear anything over the roar of the engine.

110\. Then 120. The car vibrated like it might lose all cohesion and houses were now a sickening white blur, the pedal pushed all the way to the floorboard.

It was at this moment that Joyce noticed something that unnerved her in a way she couldn’t possibly articulate, the horror being too great and incomprehensible. With each whip past the house, a shape got closer and closer to the road. It never seemed to be moving, but nevertheless it was several feet closer each pass. It was then next to the road - on the road - in the middle of the road - 

One of the last things Joyce would see before falling into oblivion would be the face of a great big deer. It was planted in the middle of the road and as the car got closer she could swear it turned and looked directly into her eyes, and then it _screamed._

A car hitting a deer is always a hell of a thing. Especially if the car is traveling at over 120 miles per hour and especially if the deer isn’t a deer at all. 

The noise of the impact was deafening. Immediately the windshield shattered, spraying tinkling glass upon them both. The passenger side took the brunt of the hit, causing the car to tilt and become airborne. Jim was killed instantly, his head slamming into the steering wheel. As the car flipped, Joyce experienced a moment of weightlessness - then everything went black.

They woke to the sound of water against the hardwood floor. It was morning, Jim was alive and asleep right next to her. The mattress was leaking. She sat upright, leaned over the edge of the bed, and puked.


	3. I feel numb.

“We fucking _died,_ Jim,” her hands trembled, fumbling with the lighter. “I don’t think it matters anymore if or when I smoke.”

They sat together on the wet bedroom floor. _Nothing_ mattered anymore, apparently. What’s the point of draining a waterbed if it’s going to show up just as leaky the next morning anyway? The shirt she slept in clung to her, damp with sweat and the water from the mattress. Her hair was a matted limp mess. 

“And what the fuck was up with that deer anyway? It should’ve messed up the car, but not to the extent that we died. It seemed so … personal. Aware of me. Angry at me. It was a fucking deer! And I think it genuinely _wanted_ to kill us!”

“What the fuck do you suggest we do about it, Joyce?” He slammed the flat of his hand against the dresser. This was infuriating. All of it. Jim felt like a caged animal, all revved up with quite _literally_ no place to go. “Cause I got no fucking idea.”

“I don’t know,” She waved her cigarette in the air. A series of contusions rippled in and out of existence across her the entire flesh of her arm, turning his stomach. They must have been remnants from the crash, lingering damages that somehow existed and didn't exist all at once. He wondered if they were all even from the same crash - how many times had they hurt themselves? In how many different ways? “Maybe we should check the house for clues or something.”

“Oh okay, Nancy Drew. Which one of the Hardy Boys do I get to be?”

“Stop fucking snapping at me, asshole. I’m sure you have a better idea.”

No, he didn’t. And she was right, he really did need to stop snapping at her. It’s not like this was her fault or anything. On top of that, it seemed like all they had in here was each other. Wherever here was.

“You’re right.” Not too keen on the idea of sitting in a puddle, he instead rested on the edge of the bed frame. She leaned her head against his thigh, his fingers burying into her hair. “I’m sorry. We can’t fight with each other, not if we’re gonna get through this. We need to stay sane. Both of us.”

“Jim,” she whispered fearfully. “How long do you think we’ve been here? How many days do you think - before we started to notice?”

“I don’t know.” As he spoke, his leg throbbed. It was almost constant now, a sickening, pulsating ache. He should probably tell her, but he didn’t want to. Not yet. There was already so much going on. She didn’t need to worry about him too. “And I don’t think I _want_ to.”

He began his investigation in his office, hoping that maybe his familiarity with the room would make it a bit easier to find anything - if he even knew what to look for. So far, nothing had really struck him as odd, shifting through various stacks of newspapers, manuscripts, and battered trade paperbacks. So much detritus for a life he wasn’t even sure he had ever lived. There were manila envelopes from his publisher, what looked like a more-than-slightly urgent series of correspondences from the IRS, and a disconcerting amount of empty cigarette packs. But nothing that seemed of great importance.

He sat heavily in his desk chair and replayed what he could remember of the past few … days? Weeks? Whatever vague amount of time he could recall. Which was difficult, considering that he didn’t know exactly _when_ this nightmare began. At what point did his memories start to become false? His books - his house - his _wife_ \- was his name even James fucking Hopper?

Fuck. This was heavy. It reminded him of the time that his dipshit cousin talked him into smoking a joint with him - only it wasn’t _just_ a joint - and he couldn’t remember how to fucking breathe - started thinking he could taste colors -

But. Did _that_ even happen?

And if he couldn’t trust his own past, his own memories, what did that mean for _Joyce?_ If you had asked him, he would swear without doubt that he loved her. That he had always loved her, since the first moment he set eyes on her. But if he wasn’t Jim and she wasn’t Joyce and this wasn’t their house - how could he know if what they had was real? That was the scariest thought of them all. To not just lose her, to not only lose what they had. But maybe that they never even had it at all.

He wanted to scream. Just put his head in his hands and scream.

And then he saw the typewriter.

Or, more accurately, the paper loaded _into_ the typewriter. He had been working on his latest novel, part of his Chuck Finley hard-boiled detective series. At least he thought he had. It should have been the stupid love scene his agent wanted, between Chuck and the beautiful-but-haunted Nadine O’Reilly. Instead it was one phrase, typed over and over and over.

 _wakeuphopwakeuphopwakeuphopwakeup_ _  
_ _hopwakeuphop wakeup h o pwake up h_

_Opw w a k eup_

Oh. No. No, thank you.

The ink was still wet, smearing all over his hands as he tried to rip the pages from the machine. Which was odd, considering he hadn’t touched the damn thing all day. Even odder still was the way that the ink was starting to bubble out of the machine, dripping down the sides and pooling onto the desk.

It also definitely _was not_ ink. It was viscous and crude and stuck to his skin and it _stank._ The smell was overpowering, that sweet and rotten smell of decay, and it brought back a memory he had misplaced - leaning in the dirt of the garden, looking at that awful fungus and all the _goddamn slugs._

In a fit of rage and blind disgust he grabbed the typewriter, intending to run it outside and throw it directly in the trash. Instead of hard plastic and metal, his hands connected with a warm soft-surface, not entirely unlike skin. And it wriggled against his palms.

Absolutely. Fucking. Not.

Whatever this thing was, it was definitely not his typewriter, and very urgently needed to get as far away from him as possible. He dry-heaved as he lifted it, feeling the way it sagged and twisted in his arms like a newborn, moving at the closest speed to a run his leg would allow.

When he got to the trash can, the black liquid had ran down all the way to his elbows, and he practically hurled the cursed thing in. Which was, retrospectively, a mistake.

It exploded on contact, with a fleshy wet squelch. The closest thing he could compare it to was when, as a kind of shitty preteen boy, he and his friends would go around smashing up old jack o’lanterns left out after Halloween. He really would’ve liked it if it just spilled out rotten pumpkin seeds. Instead, the trash can was now filled with a teeming mass of hundreds, if not thousands, of maggots. Weird little black maggots.

He stared, transfixed. And then he heard Joyce shriek from inside the house.

“Are you okay, Joyce?”

White as a sheet, she stared into the sink. He hadn’t seen her move or speak since he entered the kitchen - he couldn’t even be sure she knew he was there. 

“Fucking talk to me, kiddo. You’re scaring me.” Trying not to make her any more upset than she already was, Jim approached her with extreme caution, tentatively placing a hand on her shoulder. She shuddered at the contact.

“It’s gone.”  
  
Okay, at least she was talking. Talking was good. Talking was progress.

“What’s gone, honey? What did you see?”

“I - I turned on the sink, right? I turned on the sink because I wanted to wash my hands, I got charcoal on them - from the drawings you know?” She gestured behind them and Jim turned to look. The table was now totally covered with papers. Completely covered. Some looked to be new, un-creased and fresh. Others had not been so lucky, having been balled-up or torn, spilling out from the table and onto the floor and chairs. It occurred to him that the oldest-looking drawings, the ones most worn, were all in profile. The newer ones, the ones that lay on top, were now looking straight at them. These children she drew were quite literally, over time, turning to look at them.

The girl. He remembered her drawings from before - he remembered specifically the anger in her eyes, the little crust of blood on her nose. Taking the paper in his hand, he stared into those furious eyes - and it felt for a moment like she was looking right back.

“Jim? Are you even _listening_ to me?” 

“Yeah,” he lied. He had been so distracted by the images that he didn’t realize she had been talking at all.

“Then what did I say came out of the pipe?”

“...not water?” he offered hopefully.  
  
“A slug, Jim,” she hissed. “The pipe rattled and it squeaked, and then a fucking _slug_ plopped out and slithered right into the drain. And what the hell happened to your _hands_?”  
  
Dumbly, he looked down at them, forgetting entirely about the black sludge. He had inadvertently smeared the substance all over the page he now held, saddening him in a way he couldn’t quite articulate. Who the _fuck_ was this girl?

In a daze he stumbled to the sink, turning it on without a second thought about Joyce’s story. She started to protest, but fell silent when water began to flow from the tap, as if nothing had happened at all.

And just like that, his hands were clean too, all traces of the foul oil gone before he even made contact with the water. He wanted so badly to feel relieved, but it was so much worse, somehow.

“When are you finding the time to draw all these things, anyway?”

They sat in the living room, Jim on the couch and Joyce cross-legged on the floor. On the coffee table they had spread what little ‘clues’ they could gather. A sun-faded polaroid of the two of them, teenagers, before the accident, the only photograph they could find in the whole house. A business card for Jim’s agent, a gilded logo for ‘Nancy’s House Publishing’ with Jonathan’s name and personal number underneath. A framed marriage certificate. These were the only personal items they could find in the entire house - everything else was, on a closer inspection, either blank or incomprehensible gibberish. These objects were rounded out by the newest and most clearly-defined of Joyce’s sketches.

“I remember drawing them about as much as _you_ remember labeling them,” she retorted, trying once again to rearrange the drawings in a way that would make sense. She kept hoping that if she lined them up _just right,_ if they were put in some magical order, that she would suddenly know who they were - that it would get them one step closer to figuring out where they were and how to get out.

Jim had busied himself with a legal pad and pencil, worrying the little metal ring around the eraser with his teeth. It helped him think - he remembered distinctly being eight years old, how mad his mom used to get finding all the pencils with these mangled deformed tops. Or at least, he _thought_ he remembered. That was a rough thing to get used to. Shit.

Then suddenly, an idea.

“Hey. Hey. I think - I think I’ve got something.” He hoped he did anyway. It was an idea that felt so stupidly obvious that maybe it couldn’t possibly work. How didn’t he see it before? “The problem is that we’re stuck on _today,_ right?”

“I guess,” she conceded, tracing her finger along the jawline of the one labelled _Will._ “That’s at least part of the problem.”

“So if we’re stuck on today, we just need to get to tomorrow. What if we _make it_ to tomorrow? We just don’t go to fucking sleep, then boom. 12:01 A.M. It’s Monday. We’re out of the loop.”

The idea had him so excited that he almost didn’t notice just how mournfully she looked at the boy. Almost. He tried to ignore how much the boy looked like Joyce and the fact that his last name was _Byers._ He tried to ignore it just like he tried to ignore the fiery throb engulfing his fucking leg.

“It doesn’t sound like we have anything to lose,” she sighed, spinning the simple gold band on her ring finger. “Jim - if none of this is real - how do we know that we’re real? How do we know that...”

Her voice faded away, the rest of the question too painful to articulate. 

“I can only promise you what I feel right now, because all I _know_ is right now,” he confided. “And right now - you’re _all_ I know. If nothing else is certain here, because it sure as shit fucking isn’t, I know that I love you. And I really, really hope that you love me too.”

At 11:45, sitting on the sofa with their feet propped on the coffee table, they were cautiously optimistic, confident that they would make it past midnight but unsure what would await them on the other side. It couldn’t be this easy, could it? She had started a crossword puzzle from one of the old newspapers littering the room, but had given up when the letters kept moving around on the page. Instead she had taken to drawing in the margins, several quick doodles of a very large male deer.

At 11:55, Jim was attempting to distract himself by reading a TV Guide. It seemed that every channel was showing the same re-run of MASH - the exact same one, over and over again. Except for one channel, advertising an episode of Cheers where Diane has a mental break after Sam is crushed to death by a piano. Guest starring William Shatner. Funny, he didn’t remember that one.

At 11:57, a droplet of water landed on the side of Jim’s face. He ignored it.

At 11:59, several more had spattered down onto their heads. They looked up in unison, to see the watermark spreading across the drooping ceiling above them. Oh god the fucking _waterbed -_

At 12:00, Jim and Joyce were crushed to death when the ceiling above them sagged and buckled under the weight of a queen-sized mattress worth of water, finally collapsing with a great roar and snap of timbers. The last thing Joyce remembered was the way the bed frame crushed her windpipe as it slammed down on top of her.


	4. born with a weak heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for some rather intense body horror this chapter.

**Nothing.**

That’s all there was here. Wherever they were. Nothing. Just an empty, desolate black void. 

He had expected to wake up back up in that stupid fucking leaking waterbed. But instead, the ceiling collapsed and the weight of it all landed upon his body - 

And then they were here.

He had never known a darkness so complete - everywhere he turned, above him and below him, was blackness. What really made his stomach flip-flop was the fact that in that darkness he could still see himself and Joyce quite clearly. So it wasn’t darkness - it was just nothing. He wondered if there was even air - if he tried to speak would it make a sound? Joyce grabbed at his hand and he clutched her fingers tightly in response, trying to ground himself in something tangible, anything to stop the scream he felt building in his bones.

And then out of the nothingness - the girl. Angry girl with the bloody nose. She looked at him -  _ right  _ at him - pointed at his leg, and screamed.

It wasn’t the water that woke him this time. 

The bed was leaking, because of course it was, but he was woken first by the most intense pain he had ever felt in his entire life. Worse than the time he fell out of his grandma’s maple tree, broke his arm so bad his little nine year old eyes could  _ see  _ the bone sticking through his skin and he yelled and cried so loud he couldn't talk right for two days. Worse than the crunch of Lonnie Byer’s fender into his body, mangling his leg beyond all recognition, his bones being held together by nails and screws for so long afterwards.

That same leg was now engulfed in a vibrant flare of agony - it felt like he was being torn apart from the inside. It hurt so bad he gagged, sweat pouring down his forehead, hurt so bad he didn’t even want to look at it - afraid of what he would see when he pulled back the sheet, afraid that his leg wouldn’t even be there in any meaningful sense.

Slowly, his hands shaking violently, he peeled the sweat-soaked fabric back and retched at what he saw.

A vine-shaped contusion wrapped its way down from his hip to his foot, with little tendrils shooting off here and there. In furious puce and chartreuse just beneath the skin, contrasted by an outline of jaundiced faded yellow, it reminded him of the strange fungus in the yard. He brushed his fingers against it, as tenderly as possible against the swollen raw tissue, and he could swear it pulsated on his own, a rhythm separate from the beat of his heart. It radiated a sickening warmth.

Joyce sat up abruptly, panting, thrust from the unconscious void they were previously in.

“Jim - Jim who was that girl? Did you see that girl?”

A ripple of pain, more intense than any before - he bit down hard on his fist to stifle a scream.

“Jim, what’s - Oh my  _ god,”  _ she gaped at his leg. “What the  _ fuck  _ is wrong with your leg?”

“Does it look,” he struggled to speak between waves of alternating nausea and agony. “Like I have any  _ fucking  _ clue?”

A spot had begun to swell more than the others - right at the end of one of the little tributaries splintering off from the main stream along his leg, in the middle of the fatty part of his thigh. It was now at least a half-inch wide and just as tall.

And it was starting to  _ wiggle _ .

“Joyce - honey - go in the bathroom," he tried to speak evenly, without letting his voice betray the sheer panic bubbling up inside him. Whatever was in his leg was going to have to come out. This was going to be a goddamn ordeal. "Grab a towel you don’t like, the scissors, and a pair of fucking tweezers. Maybe some rubbing alcohol and some gauze, too.”

She returned with two of the ugliest towels she could find, kneeling on the floor to slide one under his leg. When she lifted it he swallowed a small shriek.

“Whatever happens here, and I know it’s not gonna be good,” he grunted as he pulled his t-shirt over his head, mopping his forehead with the cloth before tearing off a strip. “I need you to do everything you can to hold my leg down. Can you promise me that, hon? Hold it down as  _ hard as you can. _ ”

She nodded tearfully, jaw clenched tight, her slender fingers clutching his ankle and the very bottom of his shin. He took the strip of cloth, twisted it, and jammed it between his teeth, biting down hard.

He generously poured the rubbing alcohol onto the surface of his skin. The bulge on his thigh furiously trembled in response - Jim took one last deep breath before taking the scissors in his fist, forcing them open, and firmly slicing the blade into his skin.

Bracing himself for blood, he was greeted by something else entirely. It bubbled to the surface slowly, that stinking foul ooze from before. Little black beads on his angry red skin. Taking the tweezers, he gently pushed the wound apart. He panted heavily from the effort.

Joyce yelled when she saw the slug.

Inside of his leg, just like the one that came out of the drain, just like the ones in the garden and the maggots in the typewriter, was one of those fucking black slugs. Eating him. Growing in him. Wiggling in his  _ fucking leg. _

It had started to disappear back into the wound, and in a moment of animal instinct Jim grabbed at his skin, blocking the creature’s path of retreat. He was instantly blinded by pain and his leg jerked into the air, Joyce trying her damnedest to fight it back down. It wriggled irately against his hand, trapped beneath his skin. 

_ Deep breaths, Jim. Deep breaths now. This is only gonna get worse before it gets better. _

With as steady a hand as he could muster, he plunged the tweezers into the open wound, groping for contact with the intruder. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep this up without losing consciousness - never in his life had he felt anything like this.

“Jim! Fuck, you’ve got him, don’t move.” Joyce leaned frantically over him, straining to look into the hole in his leg, unable to see much past the constant stream of black liquid. “You have - one side of the tweezers is in his mouth - I think he’s stuck. Start pulling him, slowly.”

All pretense of masculinity long-forgotten, Jim screamed into the rag in his teeth as he started to drag the slug backwards from his thigh. It fought against him, thrashing wildly into the throbbing skin around it, seeming to stretch itself longer and longer as he pulled. Finally, with a sickening wet pop, he wrenched the entire thing out into the open.

And behind it came a spray of the black ooze. What felt like gallons of it, shooting from the hole in his leg with the impossible force of a firehose. Coating everything in a several foot radius, spraying all over Joyce’s face. The slug screamed as it dangled from the tweezers - unsure of what to do with it, but absolutely certain it could not and  _ would not  _ be allowed to go on living, Jim grabbed his lighter from the nightstand and lit it, holding the flame directly under the thing as it tried like hell to get away. Finally, the flame caught its target, and Jim tossed the whole thing onto the floor. 

They sat in stunned silence - the only sounds were the drips of the foul sludge as it slid from the ceiling and smacked onto the floor in little droplets, and the tiny screeches as the creature burned, flopping around desperately in its last throes of death. Joyce wiped at her face with the back of her hand in a futile attempt to clean herself.

The creature reduced to a pile of ash, and then simply didn’t exist at all. And with it disappeared the viscous black spray that had coated the room.

And the pain that had gripped his leg. 

Which led Jim to wonder - if this was why his leg hurt, if it was this fucking  _ house  _ gnawing at his insides - did the accident ever happen at all? Or was it a memory, put there along with everything else, to distract him from the reality of what was happening to his body?

“Joyce.” It helped him to work things out aloud.”My leg - it doesn’t hurt anymore. At all. I think - I think that  _ thing  _ was what made my leg hurt. All this time.”

“You mean - the accident wasn’t real was it?” She half-whispered her question, not daring to meet his eyes. It wasn’t something she felt needed answering. They both knew. The accident sent Lonnie away and kept Jim home. The accident gave them that summer together, those weeks they spent discovering each other and falling so totally and irrevocably in love.

If the accident wasn’t real - then none of this was.

“I don’t know what this is. I don’t know where we are. I don’t know if this is a dream, or a coma, or if this is actual fucking hell." He stood, and for the first time he could remember, without a limp, walked to the window and looked out onto the lawn. The image of the boy, the one with the far-away eyes and the gaunt sullen face, the boy he was now so sure was Joyce’s _son_ , taunted him. Joyce had a son somewhere, a whole goddamn life - and it wasn’t with him. "But I am not gonna sit here and take it.”

“What do you wanna do about it?”

Thinking of the fire and the way it made that fucking slug squirm, he smiled to himself. All he wanted now was to make this house hurt the way it had hurt him. 

“I’m going to burn this fucking house down.”

They spent the day making the house as flammable as they possibly could, dumping out bottles of booze and perfume and aerosol hairspray on every surface they could think of. Jim even took the garden hose to the car and siphoned out as much fuel as he could, starting the damn thing with his mouth like his skeezeball out-of-work uncle had taught him. 

As the flames licked the night sky, their clothes reeking of gasoline and their faces and nails filthy with ash, they sat on the lawn and watched. They felt like teenagers on the fourth of July.

He didn’t think this would achieve anything, not really. But god  _ damn  _ if it didn’t feel good, watching the house shudder and suffer. After everything they had been through - and that was only what they could remember. Who knew how long - how many Sundays, how many injuries, how many horrors visited upon them that they had forgotten? 

A cigarette dangled from her lips. Bringing the lighter up to her face, they watched a massive bruise flush around his wrist then disappear again. Her brow knit in consternation.

“You know - these bruises. My elbow, your leg. We keep coming back, right? We can’t  _ die, _ ” She took another drag from her cigarette before continuing. Nothing on her face told Jim that this would be a reassuring line of thought. “At least it doesn't seem like it. But we keep getting hurt. How much more of this do you think we can take?”

Despite the roar of the fire and the heat of the summer, the realization had chilled them, and Joyce shivered as he held her to his chest. 

“Jim,” she muttered against him, and the pain in her voice almost tore him in half. “That boy. Will. I think he’s my son.”

Her son.

Not their son.  _ Hers.  _

This was truly the worst of it all. Not trapping him there. Not smashing his head into the steering wheel or crushing him with a pile of wet floorboards or sending him into that inky black nothing or growing that vile thing in his leg.

The worst thing this house had done was give him his perfect life.

“I know.”

Parts of the house began to creak and collapse, sparks bursting into the air. The fire was loud - wood popped and screeched as it was consumed. The house sounded furious. In fact, for a moment, Joyce realized, it sounded just like that deer and that awful slug. 

Anticipating their upcoming demise, she grabbed Jim’s face with both hands and kissed him like it was the last thing she would ever do. It was, for now.

The fire had reached the gas line.

The explosion was instant.

The force of the wall of flame killed them on impact.

It was Jim who threw up this time. He heaved ugly and loud, leaning out of bed and spraying the floor with watery bile. The back of his throat tasted like ash.

“FUCK YOU,” he roared at the ceiling.


	5. I guess I must be having fun.

“You know what I’m going to do today, Jim?” She called out to him from the bottom of their bedroom closet, behind a mountain of stale sweaters and flannels and god-only-knows what else. He was almost done mopping the puke up from the floor, after they had dragged the leaking mattress into the bathroom. They could’ve just left it there, but he was a man, goddammit, and he wasn’t going to start living in his own filth. And they had certainly been punished enough for letting the leak continue undisturbed the last time.  He shuddered at the memory of the ceiling collapsing down on them.

“What’s that, hon?” 

She turned to him grinning, finally having found what she was searching for. In her right hand was an old wooden baseball bat, from Jim’s youth. She thudded it against her palm experimentally.

“I’m going to have some fun.”

Lightning fast, she wheeled around, throwing her body weight into the swing and bringing the bat into contact with the bedroom window. It shattered instantly and abruptly, an explosion of a thousand little shards that fluttered out into the air and onto the lawn below. Tiny fragmented declarations of spite. If the house had a face, she’d be spitting in it.

She laughed, sharp and airy and mean, and took the bat to all of the trinkets and clutter on top of their dresser, clearing the surface in one fluid swing. When she turned to him, breathless, her cheeks flushed and her eyes crackling with unhinged rage, he had never felt more in love.

Maybe Joyce was on to something here.

Maybe it would feel good to really fuck some things up.

They spent the day in a flurry of hedonistic pleasure and destruction. They broke mirrors with their bare fists. They threw every dish in the cupboard onto the linoleum floor, using the smash of the ceramic to distract themselves from the ever present drawings, the crumpled sketches that now dominated the table and were spilling from the cabinets. They took that baseball bat and a crowbar to the car in the driveway. They drank hard and laughed even harder. They overturned furniture, carved rude messages into the walls like a pair of teenagers. 

Late in the afternoon, they fucked in the middle of the living room floor. 

He had been watching her as she pulled books from their shelves, tearing the pages out helter-skelter and hurling them into the air. Seeing her like this, so carefree, so fucking  _ beautiful  _ \- he was struck by the sudden certainty that wherever it was they were from or wherever it was they were supposed to be, it was a place where she didn’t get to be like this. 

All he wanted, more than anything in the world, was to make Joyce smile just a little longer.

She was so engrossed in what she was doing that she didn’t realize he was behind her, didn’t anticipate the feel of his hands coming to rest on her hips. Joyce jumped back against him slightly, making him acutely aware of the feeling of her body flush with his. The book in her hands fell to the floor with a dull thud. He wondered idly if this was a bridge they had crossed before - theirs was a strange dance, fraught with memories both real and imagined. How could he ever know if the smell of her hair or the sound of her tiny little gasps was something he had learned first hand?

Did he really care? 

Bringing his head down to her level, he brushed his lips against the side of her neck, eliciting one of those same little gasps.  At least he could say that one was real.

“Is this okay?” he whispered, nuzzling into her hair. 

_Funny_. Asking your wife if it was okay to kiss her.

In lieu of a spoken response, she wheeled around to face him and clutched the front of his shirt, bringing her mouth to his.

The kiss was reckless, his body crowding hers back against the bookshelf as they hungrily clamored against each other for more. They were insatiable, days and weeks and months of pent up fury and frustration culminating in this release. It was a foothold, some purchase of joy in the insurmountable wall of fucked-up shit they were forced to grapple with their every waking moment.

Everything around them was fiction - but this, the feel of her nails grazing the skin of his shoulders as her hands slipped up and under his t-shirt, the coarse texture of her hair in his hands, the sounds of their whiskey-scented breathing - it was so acutely real. 

It could have been the first time or the hundredth time, there was no way he could ever know. Jim tried as hard as he could to capture every detail, every single inch of her nude form that he could see as she straddled him on the carpet. The porcelain beauty of her skin was temporarily marred by a flash of deep purple and green across her sternum. They had grown accustomed to the chameleon flutters across their flesh - the psychedelic ripples of bruises and contusions and scars both somehow there and not there that flared an angry rainbow on their bodies, appearing and disappearing at will.

Trying to ignore these reminders of their situation, he leaned back against the upturned couch, focusing on the way her features contorted in concentration as she lowered herself onto him, hissing through her teeth at the sensation. This delicate, furious little thing, with her wide dark eyes and sharp edges.

“Has anyone ever told you,” he gasped. “You’re angry when you’re beautiful?”

“Shut up, Hop,” she whispered playfully, nipping at his shoulder. 

Then everything slid sideways. 

His mind was suddenly whirling, a kaleidoscope of recollection. 

_ Hop  _ \- she called him Hop -not Jim  _ never _ Jim - when they crouched under the bleachers sharing a cigarette as she bitched about Lonnie - she was always cold in the fall and she liked to wear his too-big jacket, this denim monstrosity that drowned her - this scrawny little thing, so angry at the world - and he tried to not wear his heart on his fucking sleeve, tried to pretend he cared about some cheerleader or something - all he wanted to do was take that stupid cigarette from her lips - 

then he was in the jungle - crawling through some godforsaken Vietnamese mud pit - and there were explosions and fire and some poor fucking kid from oklahoma was crawling with him and kept calling out to him -  _ hop hop help my goddamn arm is gone man  _ \- he was so scared no teenager should ever be this fucking scared - he just kept crawling forward thinking about home as his ears rang from the roar of the engines over his head -

And then he was back on the carpet with Joyce, her hips undulating a perfect, slow rhythm. He tried to fight it, to not drown in this torrent of memories, wanting so desperately to tether himself to this moment. He wanted to be  _ right  _ here with Joyce as her hands braced the sofa behind him for support and her lips came up against his ear, gently moaning that same name again,  _ hop -  _

_ hop man, ain’t seen you in a long time -  _ the bartender at that shitty dive outside of Hawkins was pouring him a shot - he hadn’t been back home since graduation and was only here to help his mom sell the house - he felt so old now, everything looked so different here - death had changed him, seeing it and smelling it so close to him - and he asked him about Joyce -  _ man, don’t you know she’s Joyce Byers now? married that idiot Lonnie  _ \- 

then a different bar, a louder bar in a bigger city -  _ i’m so proud of you, james  _ \- a beautiful blonde woman was sitting across from him, toying with some gold tennis bracelet on her wrist - he just graduated from the police academy and this woman was congratulating him - Diane - fuck, her name was  _ Diane  _ how could he forget his wife -

Back again to Joyce. He tried so hard to stay here, grabbing her hips and pulling her down against him, as if holding on to her physically could keep him in this moment.

“Joyce,” he groaned, bucking up against her. Her eyes were screwed shut, and he wondered if it was happening to her too. “Look at me, please.”

The images were coming faster now - the pain of remembrance a stark counterweight to the ecstasy of Joyce’s body against his. They flashed so quickly. 

on a playground - there was a little girl and she was laughing and smiling at him until she wasn’t and then she was on the ground and - he was sitting next to a hospital bed and her little hand was clutching his and he felt it getting weaker and weaker and he had never been so scared -

his wife’s fists pounded against his chest but he didn’t care - didn’t feel anything - a flash of blonde hair as she slammed their front door - then the inside of some shitty trailer - so many dive bars and little mirrors with lines of white powder and women whose faces he barely even registered and empty pill bottles - 

Joyce again - but not his Joyce, a worn-down Joyce, who was yelling at him for something about her son - flashes of horrible unspeakable things with claws and teeth and blood and so much screaming and that angry little girl again with the curls and the bloody nose and something about fucking frozen waffles and Joyce was crying about someone named Bob - then they were looking for something in the woods and then the ground gave out -

He was back again, and he knew it was for good this time, knew there was nothing else. Their pace had grown punishing, no longer a tender exploration but instead some deep animal thing, and he realized at some point he had started to cry.

“Joyce - I’m,” he stuttered, and she moaned in acceptance, his hips snapping up against her once, twice, three times - then stillness. She buried her face against his neck, wrapping her arms around him, and  _ jesus,  _ was she crying too? “Are you okay? Joyce, talk to me.”

She was sobbing now, little muffled cries that shook her shoulders. As she pulled away from him, he brought his hands to the sides of her face, and she leaned into his touch. When she finally met his gaze, her red, kiss-swollen lips trembled. She was wrecked. 

“I remember, Hop. I remember all of it. _Everything_.”

“I know.” What could he say? What he could  _ possibly  _ say to make this better? “I remember, too.”

They sat silently, for minutes, hours, maybe days. Time didn’t matter here, this they now knew. All of it was wrong - every single memory or idea they had of each other, of their lives, was  _ wrong.  _ The real Joyce and Jim did not live in a comfortable two-story home with a white picket fence, paid for by jobs they loved. The real Joyce and Jim were not blissful, well-adjusted adults who spent days in the sun tending tickseed flowers and laughing, but were damaged and battle-scarred losers, who were dealt shitty hands and made even shittier bets. 

And the real Joyce and Jim didn’t have each other.

_Actually, hang on._ This was a thought.

He lay on the carpet, nude, an ashtray resting on his stomach and his hands behind his head. A cigarette dangled precariously from his lips and he stared at the ceiling. 

“If this - if this is a punishment,” he struggled to organize his thoughts. He had drank too much today and the sex and the general mental breakdown that followed had rattled him somewhat. “If this is hell or whatever, like if we’re dead and this is supposed to be a bad thing - which it is cause it fucking  _ sucks _ , right? But if this is supposed to be torture - why would I have cigarettes and whiskey and … you?

“Joyce, this can’t be hell if I’m allowed to have you with me.”

“So you’re saying - wherever we are, whatever is keeping us here - it’s trying to make us happy?” Joyce, wearing only her underwear and an open flannel of Jim’s, examined a deep gouge in the wall she had made earlier, when she had carved “FUCK OFF” above the sofa. In particular, the bottom of the second  _ F  _ was bothering her. The wallpaper had peeled away slightly and hung in a flap.

“It wants us to  _ want  _ to be here.” He was onto something now, something big. “And if it wants us to want to be here - that means it doesn’t want us to want to leave.”

Where she had expected to find wood or drywall there was instead something inky black and  _ pulsing.  _ She placed her palm against it, and it squelched at the contact. There was a palpable pulse, a clear thudding movement, and that foul-smelling black liquid bubbled out and covered her hand.

“Jim. I think the wall is bleeding.”

He stood, pulling his jeans on haphazardly. She wasn’t seeing it, wasn’t grasping the ramifications of what he was saying.

“If it wants to want to stay here - Joyce, maybe that means we can  _ leave. _ ”

He grabbed her shoulders, wheeling her around to face him, and saw that his revelation hadn’t been as warmly received as he had hoped.

“Do we want to leave?” Her voice was barely above a whisper, and she stared at her hand, transfixed by the black fluid smeared on it. “Do  _ you  _ want to leave?”

This wasn’t what he expected. Not at all.

“What do you mean? Of course I want to leave. Why wouldn’t I?”

“What if we don’t remember this? What if we go back - and all of this goes away? I want my kids, Hop. I miss my fucking kids but - I don’t want to lose you.”

There was an urgency in her voice, and for good reason. The wall  _ was  _ bleeding. Every single carving was now starting to ooze - and as he glanced around the room, he could see lines of the stuff dripping from the corners of the ceiling. There was a tremor underneath his feet - slight, like a semi-truck or a train had gone by, but it didn’t stop. 

The house was _dying_.

Was it because they had remembered? Because they had woken up? Or had they been able to wake up because of it? Because whatever held them here was weakening, losing its grip on them?

“I promise you, Joyce.” He clutched her to his chest as the floor began to vibrate in earnest now. The walls were trembling, and a large crack had formed in the ceiling. “I won’t forget this. You won’t lose me.”

“I love you, Jim.”

“I know,” He kissed the top of her head, her fingertips digging into his shoulders. The house had begun to collapse. “I love you too, Joyce.”

There was a great cracking of wood and a horrible unearthly scream.   
  
And then nothing.


	6. epilogue: the less we say about it the better.

He was aware of voices. A gaggle of kids all talking over each other at once. Someone was shining a light on his face and there was a lot of excited whispering - every single bone in his body ached. He tried to speak and was immediately taken by a violent coughing fit. His throat had never felt so raw. And why did everything smell like dirt and rotten meat? It smelled like there was mud caked in his nostrils. Hell, there probably was.

A hand was reaching for his - small fingers laced with his own.

_ Joyce.  _

He tried to turn his head to look at her, but his neck was too stiff and he couldn’t rotate as far as he needed to. Besides, as he blinked his eyes open, his vision was too blurred to see much of anything very clearly. There were a lot of flashlights now - it was way too bright, and he instinctively tried to lift a hand to cover his face. There was a tearing sound as he did, like a hundred frayed little ropes were snapping as he pulled his arm upward, and someone was rushing forward and telling him not to move. Something was cutting something around him, more of the little ropes, and then lifting him up.

He felt himself drifting back out of consciousness, but he needed to see her, to make sure she was okay. They were lifting him upward and out of something, some kind of pit, surrounded by wet earth on all sides. There was an imprint in the dirt where he had been - a clear outline of broken roots, places where tendrils of that fungus had been ripped and cut to clear him away.

And next to that outline was Joyce, her body enmeshed in that same web of black fungus. She looked so frail, her skin a horribly jaundiced yellow. Nancy was there, kneeling next to her, gently pulling a horrifyingly long appendage from her mouth and down her throat. The last thing he saw before the blackness took him again was Joyce gasping a lungful of air.

They spent days in the hospital, awake and not awake, luckily never dreaming. Every time he shut his eyes he was so afraid he’d find himself in that fucking house, that he’d wake up to that stupid leaking waterbed again.

As far as anyone could tell, he and Joyce had gone out to the woods and fell into this kind of sinkhole, generated by a large network of fungi. Their systems were flooded with hallucinogens, created by this fungus, presumably to pacify its prey while it dissolved them. It fought so hard to keep them - every time the kids had tried to cut at it or pull them away it dragged them deeper into the dirt. El had been the one to finally force it off. It screamed as she killed it. 

They were only gone for 18 hours.

By the time they were wheeling him out of the hospital, the memories of it all were already starting to fade. There were fuzzy recollections of a red car and a typewriter and slugs and Joyce smiling up at him, looking at him so warmly from under those long fluttering lashes. But the images were all disjointed and devoid of context, like trying to remember a dream upon waking.

His left leg had broken in the fall, and the fungus had pounced onto the opportunity, wreaking havoc with it. It was a half-digested mess of crushed bone and shredded tissues. Several hours of surgery later, it was riddled with pins and screws, a large cast covering the whole thing. It would be a long time before he could walk on his own. 

Joyce had already offered to let him stay with her, had insisted she didn’t mind pushing him around Hawkins all summer.

They sat on her porch, as she doodled on his cast in black sharpie like some kind of teenager. Someone in the classifieds was selling a typewriter, and for some reason he felt  _ really  _ compelled to buy it. As he circled the phone number, he looked down at Joyce, watching her scrawling on the surface of his cast, and felt the strangest sensation of deja vu.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand we're done. Quick round up of all the things I stole from other things:
> 
> The waterbed is from the X-Files episode Monday. The hallucinogenic fungus that eats you is from the X-Files episode Field Trip. Chuck Finley is the alias Bruce Campbell's character uses on Burn Notice. Every chapter title is a lyric from The Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place". And "Did anyone ever tell you you're angry when you're beautiful?" is directly ripped from Star Trek: Voyager.


End file.
